The Inventionof World Religions

Or, How EuropeanUniversalismWas Preservedin the Languageof Pluralism

TOMOKO MASUZAWA

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Tomoko Masuzawa teaches European intellectual history and criticaltheory at the University of Michigan, where she holds a joint appointmentin the Department of History and the Program in Comparative Literature.She is the author ofIn Search of Dream Time: The Questforthe Ori9inofReli9ion,also published by the University of Chicago Press.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London© 2005 by the University of ChicagoAll rights reserved. Published 2005.Printed in the United States of America

To the memory of Walter H. Capps (1934-1997)

1413 12 II 10 09 08 07

ISBN (cloth): 0-226-50988-5ISBN (paper): 0-226-50989-3

543

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Masuzawa, TomokoThe invention of world religions, or, How European universalism

was preserved in the language of pluralism f Tomoko Masuzawap. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.ISBN 0-226-50988-5 (hardcover: alk. paper)- ISBN 0-226-50989-3

(pbk.: alk. paper)1. Religions. 2. Religion. 3. Europe-Religion-History.

4. Universalism. I. Title: Invention of world religions. II. Title:How European universalism was preserved in the language ofpluralism. Ill. Title.

BL80.3·M27 2005200'f04-dc22

@The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirementsof the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI z39.48-1992.This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents

Preface ix

Introduction 1

1 World Religions in the Academy Today 2

2 The Discourse on Religion as a Discourse ofOthering 14

3 A Synoptic Overview 21

4 Writing History in the Age of Theory:A Brief Discourse on Method 29

PART 1

Chapter 1 "The Religions of the World" before "World Religions" 37

1 "World Religions" in the Age of World Wars 372 Early Modern Taxonomy, or the Order of Nations 463 Before the Birth of Science 64

Chapter 2 The Legacy of Comparative Theology 72

1 Two Pioneers: Frederick Denison Maurice andJames Freeman Clarke 75

2 Strategies for Representation 793 A Critic: Charles Hardwick 864 The Variety of Para scientific Comparativism 95

PART 2

Chapter 3 The Birth Trauma of World Religions 107

Chapter 4 Buddhism, a World Religion 121

1 Before Buddhism 122

2 Europe Discovers Buddhism 125

3 Buddhism and the Future of Europe 138

Chapter 5 Philology and the Discovery of a Fissure in the European Past 147

1 The Discovery of the Indo-European Past 1492 The Birth of Comparative Grammar 1563 The Supremacy ofInflection 1634 The Essential Nature of the Semitic: Ernest Renan 171

Chapter 6 Islam, a SemiticReligion 179I The Problem ofIslam for Premodern and

EarlyModern Europe 1802 The Problem of Semitism and Aryanism for

Nineteenth-Century Europe 1863 Islam, the ArabReligion: Abraham Kuenen 1924 Sufism, an AryanIslam: Otto Pfleiderer 197

Chapter 7 Philologist Outof Season: F.Max Mulleronthe Classification of Language and Religion 207

I The Aristocracyof BookReligions 210

2 On the Possibility of the Common Originof Languages 221

3 The Trouble with the Turanian 2284 The Real Trouble with the Turanian 2345 ATaleof TwoBurnoufs 244

PART 3

Chapter 8 Interregnum: OmnibusGuidefor Lookingtowardthe Twentieth Century 259

I Bequest of the Nineteenth Century: The SacredBooks of the East, 1879-1910 259

2 The World's Parliament of Religions, 1893 2653 Amateur Interests HaveTheir Say:

PrivateFoundations and Endowed Lectureships 2744 Colonial Self-Articulation 2825 Transitional Systems 291

Chapter 9 The Questionof Hegemony: Ernst Troeltsch andthe ReconstitutedEuropeanUniversalism 309Unconcluding Scientific Postscript 324

Bibliography 329

Index 351

Preface

A few steps around the corner from the Pantheon, in the heart of Rome, onecomes upon a small square, typically crowded with parked cars during the day.At the center of Piazza Minerva stands a curious monument, a charming stonestatue of a smiling elephant carrying an obelisk on its back, tilting its head tothe side and playfully lifting its trunk, as if in greeting. As with all the paganrelics of conspicuous size erected in the city, the obelisk-not a very tall oneby comparison-is crowned with a cross, and in this fashion the monumentgraces the approach to the church of Santa Maria Sopra Minerva, or as one lo-cal guidebook translates it, Our Lady on Top of Minerva. The church, indeed,was originally built in the eighth century on the ruins of a temple of Minerva,and the obelisk, which was discovered in 1665 in the garden of the Dominicanmonastery attached to the church, is said to have belonged to a temple ofIsisthat once stood nearby. The elephant, a somewhat diminutive creature withdemure aspect, smaller ears, and stubby tusks, suggests that it could be of anAsian variety, and its ornate saddle reminds one of a royal howdah from India.To be sure, what the image of an elephant conveyed or what "India" meant tothe contemporary observer when the monument was erected in 1667 couldnot have been quite the same as what such things signify to us today. Nor isit likely-given that this was nearly two centuries before Champollion deci-phered the Egyptian hieroglyphics-that either the artist, Gian Lorenzo Ber-nini, or Pope Alexander VII, who commissioned the work, knew what the in-scription on the obelisk had to relate, namely, certain exploits of Apries (knownin the Hebrew Bible as Hophrah), a pharaoh in the sixth century BeE and anally of Zedekiah, king ofJudah, against Nebuchadnezzar. Today, all this intel-ligence is readily available to anyone who consults the Blue Guide, the vademecum of post-Victorian British travelers, and still the tour book of choice forthe learned. For this, we owe much to the scholars of the nineteenth century, 1

as well as to their contemporaries' sudden passion for travel and sightseeing,

1. Theculminationof this scholarshipmaybe observedin WilliamS. Heckscher'slearnedarticlepublishedin themid-twentiethcentury,"Bernini'sElephantandObelisk"(1947).

Introduction

Poor grammar, fuzzy semantics, or uncertain orthography can never stop aphrase from gaining currency if there is enough practical demand for it inthe spirit of the times. In our times, the term "world religions" testifies to thisgeneral truth. This imperfectly wrought, decidedly ambiguous phrase-some-times hyphenated, most often not, sometimes as a possessive ("world's reli-gions"), other times not-is as commonplace as any subject heading in theusual docket of things to be learned in school. College students with no previ-ous instruction on the subject seem to understand what it is when they decideto enroll in a course by that name. Any bookstore clerk can direct the customerto the appropriate shelves when inquired about a title in that category. Every-body, in effect, seems to know what "world religions" means, more or less, thatis to say, generally, vaguely.

What this familiarity belies, however, is a rather monumental assumptionthat is as pervasive as it is unexamined, namely, that religion is a universal, orat least ubiquitous, phenomenon to be found anywhere in the world at anytime in history, albeit in a wide variety offorms and with different degrees ofprevalence and importance. We seem to imagine ourselves living in a worldmapped-though not very neatly-in terms of so many varieties of religion,which sometimes overlap, converge, and syncretize and often conflict with oneanother. It is presumed, moreover, that religion is one of the most significant-possibly the most significant-factor characterizing each individual society,and that this is particularly true in "premodern" or otherwise non-Westernsocieties. Broadly speaking, the more "traditional" the society, the greater therole religion plays within it-or so we presume, regardless of how much orhow little we happen to know about the society in question or about its sup-posed tradition.

To be sure, these are mostly precritical, unreflected assumptions on theorder of street-corner opinions, but when it comes to the subject of religion,it appears that the scholarly world is situated hardly above street level. In thesocial sciences and humanities alike, "religion" as a category has been left

("

t .•• f ~I_., ,~

2 Introduction

largely unhistoricized, essentialized, and tacitly presumed immune or inher-ently resistant to critical analysis. The reasons for this failing on the part of theacademy, this general lack of analytic interest, and the obstinate opacity ofthe subject of religion, are no doubt many and complex. Butthe complexity maybegin to yield to critical pressure if we are to subject this discursive formationas a whole to a different kind of scrutiny, a sustained and somewhat sinuoushistorical analysis.

The central focus of the present study is the period in which the proteannotion of"religion"-which had not been, until the eighteenth century, a par-ticularly serviceable idea, at least for the purposes we employ it today-came !o_acquire the kind of overwhelming sense of objective reality, concrete facticity,and utter self-evidence that now holds us in its sway. As a result of this devel-opment, it has come to seem to us entirely gratuitous, if not to say quixotic, tochallenge the reality of religion or to question those familiar truisms that arefreely circulated about this reality.

I. World Religions in the Academy Today

A casual glance at numerous textbooks designed for classroom use today read-ily testifies to the following general consensus. "World religions," or major re-ligions of the world, almost invariably include Christianity, Buddhism, Islam,Hinduism, and Judaism, and also typically count among their number Confu-cianism, Taoism, and Shinto (though these may be variously grouped togetheror conflated as Chinese, Japanese, or East Asian religions). Somewhat less typ-ically but stilI very frequently included are Zoroastrianism (Parsee or Parsiism),Jainism, and Sikhism.1

These so-called great religions of the world-though what makes them"great" remains unclear-are often arranged by means of one or the other ofvarious systems of classification, with binary, tripartite, or even more multi-farious divisions. What these systems do, regardless of the variation, is to dis-tinguish the West from the rest, even though the distinction is usually effectedin more complicated ways than the stilI frequently used, easy language of "East

1. Verybroadly speaking, if we compare the more recent versions of world religions bookswith the older versions in the early decades of the twentieth century, it appears that Sikhismis nowadays more frequently included, whereas Taoism and Confucianism are occasionallyincluded, Shinto and Jainism less frequently itemized and treated on their own, and Zoroastrian-ism, even less. The addition of Baha'i is not uncommon. With regard to the inclusion of vario liS

tribal-scale religions (African, Native American, etc.), see below.

Introduction 3

and West" suggests.2 The demarcation, in any event, is articulated from thepoint of view of the European West, which is in all known cases historicallyaligned or conflated, though not without some ambiguity, with Christendom.These inherently asymmetrical, unilaterally concejYed sysJems of classificationexude a pretense of symmetry that appears to balance "East" and "West.'" Thisbinary may be put in terms of biblical religions versus all others, or in anotherclassic version, prophetic religions versus wisdom religions.4 The tripartitesystem, on the other hand, at first glance appears to correspond to certaingeographical locations. Under this system, each of the above named greatreligions of the world falls into one of the three categories, depending on thelocation of its origin: those originating in the ancient Near East (Judaism,Christianity, Islam), in South Asia (Hinduism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism,Jainism), or in the Far East (Confucianism, Taoism, Shinto). This system hasbeen closely associated with, and given its justification by, a racialized notionof ethnic difference. The three locations correspond to what the nineteenth-century science of comparative philology came to identifY as three distinctgroups ofIanguages: Semitic (or Hamito-Semitic), Aryan (or Indo-European),alld Turanian (roughly, Oriental). This originally philological and later racialdemarcation complicates the constitution of the West, while the rest of theworld seems to turn into an ever-receding region of the premodern lurking atthe edge of the world historical stage.

In addition to these sets of great "Western" and "Eastern" religions, manyworld religions texts, some dating back to the early twentieth century, men-tion yet another category of religions that are perhaps not so great, or what aresometimes termed "little tradi!i()ns," which tend to go by certain generic,lower-case names (such as shamanism and animism), often with a particular

2. As we shall see, the tripartite demarcation was more often favored by those writers whowere informed by philology, with a result that the West-and-rest distinction was palpably morecomplicated. Yeteven those expert taxonomists at times freely availed themselves of the lan-guage of the East and West binary, despite the apparent incongruity.

3· Byexplicitly rendering the foundational dichotomy as "the West and the rest," JohannesFabian, in his Time and Other (1983), exposes the inherent asymmetry and unilateralism of theconstruction of the West's relation to the non-West.

4· See categories in R. C. Zaehner, ed., The ConciseEncyclopediaofLivin,gFaiths(1959). In thisbinary scheme of things, the position of/slam (and sometimes Zoroastrianism) has been some-what ambiguous. Nonetheless, the differential logic itself, which allows the demarcation of theWestern domain from the rest, has proven remarkably persistent and impervious to any com-plication by factual details.

/

4 Introduction

place marker attached (e.g., Native American, Siberian, Aboriginal Australian).This category in its entirety used to be unifo!~2~all~~'~~ril21i!i.v.er~li~iol1s.:JI1the earlierdays,but more recently it has been variously termed "primal," "pre-literate," "tribal," or even "basic religions.'" The restless shifting of appella-tions may be a measure of the discomfort felt by contemporary scholars of reli-gion in their effort not to appear condescending to those peoples who used tobe referred to as savages.

Despite these incessant circumlocutions and the fine nuancing of the clas-sificatory systems, th_~r~seems to be some underlying logic silently at work iIl_all variations, and the intent of differentiation probably has not changed ap-

'preclallly.At its simplest and most transparent, this logic implies that the greascivilizations of the past and present divide into two: venerable East on the onehand and progressive West on the other. They both have been called "histori-cal," but implicitly in different senses. In a word, the East preserves history, theWest creates history. In contradistinction from both East and West, the tertiary~oup-ofminor religions has been considered lacking in history, QE at leastlacking in written history, hence its designation as preliterate. A corollary as-sumption is that the peoples of small-scale tribal societies may likely possessan unusually tenacious historical memory, but no historical consciousness.6

On the strength of this assumption, these societies are relegated to a positionin some sense before history or at the very beginning of history, hence, primal.This loose but deep association of the primitive and the prehistoric furthercomplicates the tertiary category. The ancient and extinct traditions are con-flated with the contemporary savage or tribal traditions, often treated at theoutset under a single rubric signifYing "beginning," "incipient," or "elemen-

5. "Basic religions" is a designation employed by Lewis M. Hopfe in Reli,gions of the World(1976). He subdivides the category into "Native American religions" and "African religions."Throughout the many revised editions of his work over the course of two decades or more, thiscategory, its designation, and its subdivisions have remained constant. The latest edition, theseventh, was posthumously revised and edited by Mark R. Woodward and published in 1998.

6. It is often assumed-most famously byMircea Eliade-that it is only by relinquishing thetraditional kind of sheer memory (active re-presencing of significant past moments) that apeople enter the domain of history proper. More specifically, in Zakhor:Jewish History,JewishMemory(1982), Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi narrates the advent ofJewish historiography in thenineteenth century as taking place in the wake of the collapse of the traditional Jewish religiousimperative to remember. The ideological tow of this privileging of "historical consciousness"will be discussed in chapter 9.

Introduction 5

tary"; or else they are discussed in tandem, in any case separately from the greatreligions of the East and the West.7

With these foundational categories more or less assumed in the table of con-tents, a typical world religions textbook opens to an actual map of the worldshowing an oddly irregular, often illegible, and frankly uninterpretable pic-ture of the distribution of these religions, sometimes accompanied by a list offigures indicating the respective size of the "adherents" or "believers" that eachreligion supposedly claims. As a rule, both the map and the list admit to situa-tions of "significant overlap," that is, the situations of coexistence or intermix-ture of traditions that are in principle-so itis implied-distinct. This overlapinevitably compromises the clarity of representation considerably and, despitethe palpable intentions of the mapmakers, no comprehensive view-at-a-glanceof the religious condition of the world is to be obtained from such graphics.In this respect, East Asia traditionally, and North America increasingly, presentespecially challenging situations for visual representation.8 These are regionsknown for a greater degree of coexistence, admixture, and even syncretism.

7. We can observe the transmutation and repeated reappellation of the category in the case ofsome texts that have gone through multiple revised editions. A particularly instructive case isNinian Smart's The Reli,gious ExperienceofMankind.The first edition of 1969 contains a chapter,early in the book, entitled "Primitive Religions," which is divided into a section on "prehistoricreligions" and "primitive religions." In the third edition published in 1984, the content of theoriginal chapter was greatly expanded and came to constitute three separate chapters, respec-tively entitled: "Primal Religions," "Religions of Africa," and "Religions of the Americas andthe Pacific." In the fifth edition of 1996, the title of the volume was modified and now reads, TheReli,giousExperience,and the erstwhile chapter on "primitive" or "primal" religions was renamed"Small-Scale Religions," which contains the following sections: "The Small-Scale World,""Mana," "The Australian Aboriginal Experience," "The High God," "Tabu," "Totemism," "An-cestor Veneration," "Shamans," "Patterns of Myth," "Prehistoric Beliefs," and "Theories aboutthe Genesis of Religion."

Twoyears before the third edition, Smart also published an anthology, Sacred Texts ofthe World(1982), with Richard D. Hecht. Its first chapter is entitled "The Powerful Dead," by which ismeant, the editors explain, "a representative selection of religious documents from the greaturban civilizations of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome, and the Mayaand Aztecof Mesoamerica" (I). The chapter also includes texts representing Zoroastrianism. After tenchapters representing the usual list of world religions from Judaism to Sikhism, we encounter achapter called "Small-Scale Traditional Religions," by which is meant those religions that are"usually described as 'primitive' religions or the religions of'non-literate' peoples" (337).

8. This fact may in part account for the recent appearance of books and projects on "worldreligions in America." See, for example, Jacob Neusner, ed., WorldReli,gions in America (2000),

6 Introduction

Yet the difficulty of representation may be more than a matter of mixed popu-lation or multiple affiliations. For, in some localities, being religious-or, toput it more concretely, practicing or engaging in what has been deemed "reli-gious"-may be related to the question of personal and group identity in a wayaltogether different from the one usually assumed (i.e., assumed on the basisof the western European denominational history of recent centuries). In somecases, for that matter, religion and identity may not relate at all.

For the moment, then, letus note that a map of this sort, with a demographicchart and a table of contents that name a dozen or so "major religions of theworld," sets the stage and determines the outlook of "world religions." Suchmaps, tables, and lists lend immediate facticity to the subject matter throughsheer repetition and proliferation, and thus implicitly endorse as empirical andtrue what is in reality a particular way of conceptualizing the world, or, onemight say, an idiosyncratic system of demarcating certain supposed contentsof the world.

Here, then, lies a question as obvious as it is seldom asked: ~~~E:~c()~esthis geospatial mapping of the world in religions? At its advent, did the classi-fi~~tory system of world religions replace another framework for representingthe relation between Christianity and all other known forms of religious beliefand practice? What is the logic of "world religions" that has become so preva-lent, so naturalized in our discourse that it seems as though it were no logic, noideology at all, but a mere reflection of the way things are?

One might expect scholars of religion to have done more to guide and direct ourcritical attention to these pervasive assumptions about religion and religions,but in fact, this is hardly the case.9 There may be more than one reason for this

Diana Eck, ANew Religious America (2001), and Eck's CD- ROM with the Pluralism Project ofHarvard University, OnCommon Ground(2000). Also the collection of essays on religious plural-ism in the city of Atlanta edited by Gary Laderman, Religions ofAtlanta (1996).

9. Lately,there have been exceptions to this state of inattention, but they are exceptions thathighlight the overwhelming obtuseness of the subject matter all the more. The most long-standing and celebrated of all such critical endeavors is Jonathan Z. Smith's scholarly produc-tion, now spanning four decades, beginning with the influential collections of essays MapIsNotTerritory(1978) and ImaginingReligion (1982), and more recently "AMatter of Class" (1996) and"Religion, Religions, Religious" (1998). Also long-standing is Michel Despland'~study, fromhis early work, La Religion en Occident (1979), and continuing to his most recent monograph,I:Emergence des sciences de la religion (1999). In addition, Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (1993),

Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth (1999), Russell McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion (1997), and

Intraduction 7

general inattention. To begin, as some adamantly secularist scholars-whoconstitute a sizeable and vocal minority in the field-have observed with somedispleasure, there is a higher concentration of unreconstituted religious es-sentialists in this department of knowledge than anywhere else in the acad-emy.'0 This should not come as a surprise, it is often said, given that the fieldis populated, and by sheer number dominated, by the representatives, parti-sans, and sympathizers of various religions or, more recently, by those who maybe best described as advocates and sympathizers of "religion" in general. Formany of these religion-friendly scholars and teachers, the line between assert-ing the reality of religion(s) and asserting the legitimacy of religion(s) as aproper subject for study is at best ambiguous. Understandably, those whostand on the side of religion(s), in whatever sense of that phrase, are not likelyto feel an immediate need to interrogate the category that names, for them, areality sui generis. Second, even for those academicians who are generally waryof such naive or ambiguous religious essentialism, it appears that certain insti-tutional circumstances of "religious studies" impart some disincentive to pro-ceeding with critical reflection. The institutional situation of this departmentof knowledge may be roughly described as follows.

Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction ofReligion (2003), variously address this matter. Espe-ciallyvaluable for their historically specific investigations are Peter Harrison, "Religion" and theReligions in the EnglishEnlightenment (1990), and David Chidester, Savage Syst~ms(1996). With re-gard to the history of the study of religion more generally, U~~,qu~~\\T<l<lE.d_e~bllrg~stwo-volumepublication-one volume an annotated anthology and the other a comprehensive bibliogra-phy-entitled Classical Approaches to the StudyofReligion (1973-74) made available a bird's-eye-view of the science of religion in the early period. See also a recent important monograph byHans G. Kippenberg, Discoverin~~ReligiousHistorY~~,t~e_~oder~~ge,(192Z)'

10. One of the most conspIcuous assemblies of such a'minority may be the North AmericanAssociation for the Study of Religion (NAASR),a member organization of the International As-sociation for the History of Religions (IAHR),and also affiliate of the American Academy ofRe-ligion (AAR)and of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR).NAASRbegan as agathering of scholars generally disaffected by what they perceived as unduly religious (as op-posed to scientific) and essentialist tenor of the AARmembership (this latter being by far thelargest association of religion scholars in the world). Some representative members of NAASRhave been advocates for secular and naturalistic explanations of religion (especially in the modelof cognitive science), but more recently it has also become a forum for younger generations ofscholars variously interested in critically examining the discursive practice about "religion," in-cluding the scholarly discourse ofReligionswissenschajt. This interest is also represented by somesubgroups within the AAR-most obviously the Critical Theory and Discourses on ReligionGroup-and also bythe Ideological Criticism Section of the Society for BiblicalLiterature (SEL),

another important professional organization.

8 Introduction

"World religions" has become a standard designation for an introduc-tory survey course commonly found in the religious studies curricula of manyNorth American and British universities, colleges, and, increasingly, secondaryschools. 11 As a rule, world religions courses in American institutions of highereducation-especially in the institutions where the teaching faculty of reli-gious studies consists of a significant number of research scholars who repre-sent a variety of geographical areas-have been taught by those members ofthe faculty whose area of specialty is described as "history of religions," whichin turn has been a virtual code word for any specialty other than Christianity orJudaism.12 Today's historian of religions is therefore typically a scholar in anAsian or some other non-Western religion, and he or she seems inclined to takethis teaching assignment in stride, taking the state of affairs more as a matterof convention and practical necessity than as a matter of principle.13 Thesenon-Western specialists turned teachers of "world religions" not infrequentlycomplain that such a comprehensive treatment of the subject in one course, or

II. The concept of "world religions" may be represented in a single course, usually of thatname, or bya series of introductory or midlevel courses designed to acquaint students with whatare deemed as major (and sometimes including minor) religions of the world, often grouped to-gether regionally or semi-chronologically, such as ''American religious history," "Buddhist tra-ditions," "Biblical religions," etc.

We find in the United Kingdom the most systematic and long-standing effort to date ofim-plementing "world religions" in secondary and primary school curricula. See, for instance, var-ious publications by the Shap Working Party on World Religions in Education (c/o the NationalSociety's Racial Equality Centre, London). It is noteworthy that the enterprise of this educationalcharity organization (registered address at the Chichester Institute of Higher Education) hasbeen supported bythe Commission for Racial Equality (commission set up by the Race RelationAct of 1976, reporting to the home secretary).

12. This is supposedly more a matter of convention than principle. In categorizing the spe-cialties for job advertisements, for example, no one in the profession would mistake this desig-nation. There are, however, notable scholars, such as Jonathan Z. Smith, who would be de-scribed as historians of religion for a very good reason, but whose specialty does not fit thisstereotype.

13. It is a presumption among many in the field of religious studies that, in comparison tospecialists in Judaism or Christianity, specialists in any of the so-called non-Western religionsare better equipped or at least better disposed to handle other non-Western religions as well. Theunspoken but obvious assumption here is that scholars of religion are Western, which means, inthe language of this same ideology, either Christian or Jew by birth and upbringing. Therefore,specialists in Christianity or Judaism study their own religion, in contrast with non-Westernspecialists, who in effect must be cognizant of at least two religions, one of their own, and theother of their specialty. This further belies another unspoken and unexamined assumption that

Introduction 9

even two courses, is impossibly ambitious or inexcusably simplistic, as it isbound to be too broad a survey, too flattening an analysis. It would be an un-manageable survey indeed, unless, perhaps, one begins with the scholasticallyuntenable assumption that all religions are everywhere the same in essence, di-vergent and particular only in their ethnic, national, or racial expressions. Ofcourse, this is an assumption alarmingly prevalent among the world religionsbooks now available on the market. And it cannot be denied that this well-meaning yet uncritical assumption is what brings a large number of people intoour classrooms year after year.

Today, colleges and universities in the United States, be they private or pub-lic, are inclined to regard themselves as at bottom business enterprises; theyadmit to being institutions that are market driven in some fundamental way.Transcribed atthe level of curricular units-that is, departments and programswith their own budget allocation-market driven means first and foremost en-rollment driven. This is particularly true in the humanities and many social sci-ence departments, where the percentage of outside funding in relation to thetotal operational cost of the unit is much smaller than most natural science de-partments and professional schools. Units that do not generate sufficient totalstudent enrollment numbers in their courses in proportion to the number offaculty positions are liable to be marked as not carrying their weight and, byimplication, as less fiscally responsible. In the unapologetic free market andentrepreneurial climate pervading universities and colleges in the nation, it isclear that the consistently large enrollment figure in world religions courses-as well as in derivative courses, such as courses in "Asian religions," "biblicaltraditions," and "religious diversity in America," to name a few-has beenthe single most powerful argument and justification for maintaining thesteady budget line and faculty positions in the religious studies departmentsand programs.

Given this institutional reality, the absence of any systematic critical inves-tigation into the discursive formation of "world religions" seems at once pre-dictable and inexcusable. At the outset of the present investigation thereforelies this basic recognition: if a scholar of religion, of whatever kind and of what-

non-Western specialists are automatically comparativists. since they already have the "knowl-edge" of two religions. In recent years, as more people who are neither Christian nor Jew havecome to populate the scholarly field, the new condition presents challenges to these assump-tions, but the profession at large apparently has yet to be adjusted accordingly.

10 Introduction

ever persuasion, is in fact making a living in this lately prominent domain ofworld religions discourse and capitalizing on its impressive market value, onecannot assume that this line of work is intellectually responsible just because itis economically viable. The present study is a proverbial small step in the direc-tion of a critical investigation.

The principal motive force of the study, however, is neither moral outrageagainst professional mendacity nor an impulse to set the institutional historyof the study of religion aright. Nor do I imagine myself, at the conclusion of thisbook, to be in the position to advocate a particular programmatic scheme or achange of course in the way the study of religion is to be done. To be sure, it isalways more difficult to name what one's objective is than to make a list of whatit is not. While I acknowledge the truth of this generally, with regard to thepresent study more specifically, it may be marginally clarifYing to note that Ihave been always more inquisitive about the marvelously loquacious discourseon religions-which, to my mind, is one of the most curious and conspicuousfeatures of Western modernity-than about what this modern Western dis-course insists on calling "religion itself." I have hitherto made this discoursethe primary object of my research. But if, accordingly, my own aims and strate-gies here seem rather deviant from the usual scholarly mission of the study ofreligion, I certainly cannot claim that this line of investigation is anythingunique, let alone original. For, in recent decades, discourse analysis has be-come a regular component of any discipline in the human sciences, and thefield awkwardly known as religious studies is no exception in this regard. 14

Today, we understand the term "world religions" to be more or less equiva-lent to "religions of the world," which is to say major religions, that is, thoseconspicuous-enough religions distinctly and properly identified as now exist-ing in the world. But the history of its usage in this general sense, in any typo-graphic variation-"~orld religions," "world-religions," or "world's religions"-is vexingly obscure. It is not immediately obvious when the term came into use,or in what sense. If one looks into instances of what appears to be early use of

14. In a sense, I am taking rather literally the programmatic statement famously issued byJonathan Z. Smith-though possibly with somewhat different motives and errant conse-

quences than originally intended-at the beginning of the introduction to his Imagining Religion.In any event I am by no means the first one to follow the lead. For further discussion on the topic,

see Masuzawa, "The Production of'Religion' and the Task of the Scholar" (2000).

Introduction II

the term roughly consistent with our contemporary meaning, which seems to~ave occurred in the early decades of the twentieth century,tl1ere is nothingto suggest that the phrase was patently new or expected to b-eunfa~ili~~-to thereader. Rather, "world religions" makes its appearance without~;~~~~~y~without explanation, and seemingly without a history. Typically, in those earlytexts purporting to treat all the major forms of religion to be found in the world,the author either has no use for the term or else takes it completely for granted.In either case, no one bothers to index the term, let alone define it.

~he situation may suggest that the history of the idea of world religions as we!lnderstand it today, on the one hand, and the history of the term itself, on theother, have had separate lines of descent. To be sure, there is nothing to warrantan outright presumption that the relevant history of the term/concept is conve-niently separable into two such neat halves, the halves that in due course cameto meet and intertwine. The actual history in fact seems to be considerablymore disorderly, confluent, and multifarious. This more complicated historyexplains the particular mode of presentation employed in this book, namely,why the investigation does not proceed in an orderly chronological fashion. Inshort, after preliminary research into the matter, it seemed to me plausible thatthe discursive formation of "world religions" has been a rhizomatic growth.According to this hypothesis, much of the logic of this discourse had alreadytaken shape underground before its appearance. Owing to the complex, highlycharged prehistory, moreover, once above ground, the discourse of world reli-gions continued to be sustained and ruled by an occult network of significancenot immediately transparent. Or, to resort to another metaphor, if this dis-course can be said to have developed at all, it does not seem to have been in themanner of an organic growth like the development of an oak tree from anacorn, but rather more like that other type of development that occurs in theprocessing lab, in which a photographic image finally appears.

All this is to suggest that the genealogy of the world religions discourse is not~menable to a linear, developmental, cumulative, or incremental narration.The relatively sudden appearance of the phrase "world religions" in its familiarsense indicates that this was an outbreak of sorts, not a gradual culmination orfruition. The advent of the discourse on world religions therefore may be finallydescribed in analogy with the onset of a certain serious illness, an illness that isdeeply systemic and already metastasized at the time of its first full manifes-tation. The outbreak of the discourse-that is, the actual appearance of thephrase, which brought forth a sense of utter familiarity and self-evidence-effectively marked the moment when all of its "prehistory" was suddenly

12 Introduction

overwhelmed, covered over in an avalanche of a new reality and thenceforthrendered unrecognizable.

.J.f our time, that is, the era beginning in the early decades of the twentieth cen-tury, has been preponderantly characterized by the discourse of world religionsand the concomitant ideology of religious pluralism, in the nineteenth cen-turya rather different paradigm was at work. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century discourse on religion is reputedly dominated by an array of abstractspeculative theories about the origin of religion and the subsequent stages()fits development. By common accord, scholars today opine that these bygonetheories of religious evolution were concocted largely on the basis of the un-warranted assumption of European hegemony, that is, on the basis of a mono-lithic universalist notion of history as a singular civilizing process, of whichmodern Europe was the triumphant vanguard and all other civilizations andnon-European societies merely markers of various interim phases already sur-passed by the people of European descent. It may be reasonably suggested thatit was the European interest in the future of religion-or the future beyond re-ligion, as the case may be-that motivated much of the nineteenth-centurysearch for the origin of religion and, by the same token, the search for the mostprimitive forms of religion, which were presumed to be equivalent, more orless, to the ones observable in the lives of contemporary savages, lives on thebrink of disappearance.

The narrative of world historical development, as envisioned by the eigh-teenth~and nineteenth-century European writers, may be simpl~~!l:ear,~l1at is,th~ ~tory of a gradual but steady progress from the lowest, the crudest, and themost primitive to the highest, the finest, and the most complex. Or it could belapsarian/redemptive, starting with a state of primordial innocence, then a fallinto corruption and degeneration, followed by a precarious process of recov-ery and maturation, eventually culminating in the fulfillment of providentialdestiny. Ifwe survey comparatively Hume's Natural History ofReli.gion (1756),Lessing's Education of the Human Race (1780), Hegel's oddly majestic Philosophyof History (1830-31), as well as works by Auguste Comte, Herbert Spencer,E. B. Tylor, James Frazer, and numerous other accounts of the nineteenth cen-tury, it is evident that their developmental schemata forecast the impendingmoment of apotheosis in varying ways. One version of the account projectsrational Protestant Christianity transcending its own historically particularorigins, its own cultural limitations and finitude; consequently, triumphant

Introduction 13

modern Christianity will become something else altogether than "mere" religion.Or, alternatively, a new, transcultural, objective world consciousness of sciencewill override and vanquish the magical, religious, and metaphysical world-views hitherto dogmatically upheld by hidebound traditions; consequently, re-ligion-and certainly any particular religion-will be obsolete and irrelevant.In either scenario, the universal principle that guarantees the unity of theworld, or the world as totality, ultimately comes to prevail as a direct extensionof European Christianity, or Europe as (erstwhile) Christendom. The questionfor us, then, amounts to this: ~l1at happened to this providential forecast andits robust universalism when the new discourse of ~orld religions and itsofficial doctrine of pluralism supervened?

The advent of "world religions" as a dominant discourse is generally un-derstood to mark an explicit turn away from the nineteenth-century obsessionwith the primitive and the original. Anjmplicit assumption here, often madeexplicit nowadays, is that it was also a turn away from the Eurocentric andEurohegemonic conception of the world, toward a more egalitarian and lateraldelineation. By converting from the evolutionary, pseudotemporal, hierarchi-cal order to a geographic, pseudospatial, decentralized order of representa-tion, the emergent world religions discourse appears to have liberated itselffrom Eurocentrism of a certain kind, since it acknowledges the actual pluralityof cultures and of civilizing processes. But how does the discourse of world re-ligions achieve this liberation? Or does it achieve it at all?

Today, the pluralist doctrine, albeit usually in a tepidly imprecise rendering,seems to have become the ruling ethos of our discourse on religion, scholarlyand non scholarly. Consequently, it takes some contrivance to stake out a posi-tion from which to regard and to question this ethos with due seriousness:On what moral or ideological grounds is the pluralist doctrine, as exemplifiedby the world religions discourse, predicated? What interests and concerns ani-mate this doctrine and keep it viable? Are there elements of contradiction oreven false consciousness in the way in which we are naturally led to subscribeto this doctrine? Instead of philosophically arguing for such a critical position,however, this book takes recourse in history and initiates an investigation witha set offairly uncomplicated empirical questions posed on relatively uncontro-versial grounds, namely, when, and how, this particular mode of counting andmapping religions came about.

',·f

J,

'.','

14 Introduction

2. The Discourse on Religion as a Discourse ofOthering

Let us now consider briefly the broader historical contexts in which the plural-ist discourse on religion emerged. The purpose of this section is to paint abackdrop, as it were, against which to stage the nineteenth-century episode,the main subject of the book. As with any stage setting, the backdrop presentedhere may seem unnaturally flat, ultimately incidental and inessential to thedrama, and therefore arbitrary; yet the scenery chosen has the virtue of provid-ing a perspective that allows us to focus on the academic context of nineteenth-century Europe.

In 1996, the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sci-ences, a team of ten international scholars headed by Immanuel Wallerstein,published its report under the title Open the Social Sciences.15The first chapterof the report describes the emergence, mostly in the course of the nineteenthcentury, of several new branches of knowledge, all pertaining to the nature ofcollective human life, that is, what we today refer to as the social sciences or,alternatively, the human sciences. The report begins by describing the intellec-tual outlook at the end of the eighteenth century. Learned Europeans of thattime understood or assumed the broad-stroke division of the realm of know 1-edge into two domains: natural science on the one hand, and what we havebeen accustomed to calling "arts and letters" on the other. We are also re-minded that there was a generally shared sentiment among the educated thatthe newfangled, recently productive science-the quintessential embodimentof the spirit of modernity and progress-was clearly surging ahead of themore classical, genteel sort oflearning based on arts and literature, insofar asthe empirical spirit of science had incontrovertibly triumphed over speculativephilosophy.

As the report further informs us, several new sciences of human social phe-nomena arose, more or less concertedly, representing a tertiary domain ofknowledge, located between, yet distinct from, the two preexisting domains.From the beginning, these novel disciplines of the social sciences clearly leanedtoward and emulated the already well-established and well-regarded naturalsciences, with the difference that the objects of study were matters human and

IS. In addition to the chairperson, Immanuel Wallerstein, the folIowing individuals are listed

as members of the commission established by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation of Lisbon:Calestous Juma, Evelyn Fox KelIer, Jiirgen Kocka, Dominique Lecourt, V. Y.Mudimbe, Kinhide

Mushakoji, Ilya Prigogine, Peter J. Taylor, and Michel-Rolph Trouillot.

Introduction IS

social, rather than natural phenomena.16 In the atmosphere of this generalpredilection for the scientific, history-a time-honored ideographic, as op-posed to nomothetic, study of human past activities-was transformed into ascientific discipline. No longer a narration of morally and spiritually edifYingtales about bygone eras, history became for the first time essentially a work ofresearch, whose cardinal objective now was to establish certain facts about thepast. Following this reconstitution and disciplinarization of history, then, thenineteenth-century soon saw the rise of three new social scientific disciplines.

In this report and elsewhere, Wallerstein has suggested that the triangula-tion of these nomothetic social sciences refle'cted nineteenth-century liberalideology, which envisioned the workings of human society in terms of threedistinct though intertwined spheres.17 There is political science, which studiesthe realm of power and the state; economics, which studies the market; and so-ciology, which studies what is left, that is, civil society. Because nineteenth-century intellectuals saw their own society as consisting of these spheres, thisset of three sciences seemed to them entirely adequate to achieve a compre-hensive understanding of modern European society. It was quite another mat-ter, however, when it came to the study of non-European societies. As Waller-stein points out, along with these nomothetic social sciences that were properto the West, there developed two additional disciplines specifically to studynonmodern, non-European societies. If the society in question was small and"tribal" in its scale and lacked the technology of writing, it would be an objectof study for anthropology. If on the other hand, the society happened to be alarge-scale, regionally dominant kingdom or empire and had a long and illus-trious written tradition, it would fall under the aegis of Oriental ism. In sum, inaddition to the refurbished discipline of history being made more scientific,the nineteenth century saw the formation of three nomothetic disciplines tounderstand the West, and two more new sciences to investigate the rest.

Here, we may note that, in this picture of nineteenth-century intellectualdevelopment and disciplinary for;natl()~~-what some scholars of the time had

I6. Immanuel WalIerstein et aL, Open the Social Sciences (I996), 9-I4.

17· Because the publication is in the name of the commission, it would not be proper toequate the observation made here as that ofWalIerstein alone. A few years before the publica-tion of the Gulbenkian report, however, I heard him speak at the University of North Carolina atChapel HilI, and on that occasion he rehearsed the same argument contained in the report, andhe delivered his lecture without particular reference to the commission. Owing to these cir-cumstances, I have taken-for the sake of convenience-the liberty ofletting WalIerstein standfor the views expressed in the book.

16 Introduction

already begun to call the "science of religion," or Re[igionswissenschaft, is no-where to be found by name. This fact, rather than discrediting or diminishingthe value of Wallerstein's schema for our purposes, actually illuminates it frombehind, for, once we probe into the logic of objectification and the principle ofdifferentiation that must have been at work in the formation of these five newdisciplines just named, it becomes evident that religion was indeed an exceed-ingly important factor.

To examine the side of the three sciences for the West first, it stands to rea-son that political science, economics, and sociology should come into exis-tence just at this time, just as politics, economy, and the social life of citizenswere seemingly coming into their own, in short, just as this society was becom-ing secularized. According to the narrative of secularization now eminently fa-miliar, these spheres were emerging from the control of church authority andbecoming increasingly liberated from the sphere of religion. In effect, the logichere seems to be that these new sciences became viable and effective as ways ofunderstanding European society because this society had finally reached ma-turity, that is, had sufficiently developed in accordance with rational principlesand established itself on the basis of the rule oflaw, instead of on some real orimagined supernatural authority.

In contrast, every region of the nonmodern non-West was presumed to bethoroughly in the grip of religion, as all aspects oflife were supposedly deter-mined and dictated by an archaic metaphysics of the magical and the super-natural. In the case of preliterate tribal society, it was assumed that the dom-inant metaphysics would be a form of natural religion, that is, a moral universesaturated by supernatural and autochthonous powers, a cosmology deeply in-grained in the landscape, the cycle of seasons, and the natural rhythms oflife.As we know, this type of assumption concerning tribal-scale society inducedmany anthropologists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries toconcentrate their attention on what they were inclined to identify as "religion,"in order to find therein some obscure logic or arcane "prelogical" system ofthought presumably governing all aspects of tribal life. For this reason, incontrast to their more recent counterparts, Victorian anthropologists were ex-tremely keen on the subject of what they called "religious beliefs and prac-tices." They eagerly collected, cataloged, compared, and attempted to system-atize myths, rituals, and other noteworthy customs and habits that seemed tomake a given tribal society unique and peculiar and, at the same time and in an-other sense, very much like tribal societies found elsewhere. The presence, orrather the supposed predominance, of religious and supernatural elements

Introduction 17

was believed to mark tribal society as decisively different from modern Euro-pean society.

Orientalist scholarship, in the meantime, had been discovering, editing, andtranslating the literary treasures of some of the most powerful nations knownin history. Following the pioneering work of eminent savants and intrepid dis-coverers of the eighteenth century such as Thomas Hyde, Anquetil-Duperron,N. B. Halhed, and William Jones, the study of the Orient emerged as a fashion-able and respectable science, or Wissenschaft, in the nineteenth century. TheOrient, "the land of origin," had been so named by the Europeans long before,rather more symbolically than precisely, and-it came to encompass an enor-mous spread of regions, peoples, and languages ranging from North Africa tothe Pacific East. As more and more archaic literary languages of the legendarynations of the East became known to the scholars of the West, and more andmore of the venerable texts of these nations were amassed and cataloged inthe libraries of European metropoles, this scholarship acquired a burgeoningauthority over the indigenous institutions of knowledge. In the face of thisformidable learning, the non-European nations-which by the end of the nine-teenth century had largely come under direct European colonial control (in thecase ofIndia and Egypt) or under its overwhelming influence and intervention(as was the case in China and Japan)-no longer seemed to possess the powerand the prerogative to represent their own legacy apart from this scholarship.

L~~~.~nthropology, the "science of the East" was preoccupied by the subjectof religion. For Orientalists, however, the religions in question did not amountto generic supernaturalism or varieties of natural religion but instead werepresumed as specific, historically unique traditions. According to nineteenth-century opinion, countless examples of primitive tribal religions might be justso many expressions of some basic and natural human propensities and be-ha.viors in the face of the mysterious and the superhuman, whether in the form()f worship, propitiation, or other observances. In contrast, each of the so-call~d Oriental religions was deemed singular and irreducible to a commpngenre. Many of these ancient Oriental religions died out, supposedly, togetherwith the peoples and civilizations to which they respectively and uniquely be-longed. But others apparently survived in altered forms and came to be recog-nized as "living religions," or today's world religions. These great religions ofthe past and present, unlike the tribal religions, are deemed not generic butunique and proper to themselves because, presumably, they have developedas culturally and historically particular delineations, and because they werepredicated on specific defining events or acts, usually associated with certain

18 Introduction

historical personages-founders, teachers, prophets, reformers. Furthermore,nineteenth-century Europe was generally of the opinion that, upon encounter-ing and confronting any of these world religions, an indigenous tribal religionwould eventually and inevitably dissipate or disappear, through the process ofassimilation, atrophy, or banishment.

AHl1e science of religion began the task ofidentifying and classifYing Ori-~ntal religions in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, each of theseg~~'!t, historically unique religions came to be recognized as a vast and power-ful metaphysical system deeply ingrained in the social fabric of a particularnation, and in the psychical predilections of its individual citizens and subjects.As such, these religions offered European scholars a powerful, far-reaching,and comprehensive categorial framework by virtue of which they could hopeto explain the characteristic features of a given non-European society. In ef-fect, according to the essential logic of this scholarship, a non-European na-tion of any stature was presumed to have one (or sometimes more than one) ofthese world religions in lieu of Christianity. Just as Christianity h~d shap~and disciplined the European nations for centuries, in a non- European nation,a world religion of one kind or another had been functioning as the veritablebaGkbone of its ethos.

The difference between Christianity and other "great religions" of the world,of course, has been told in myriad ways by Europeans and by others for nearlytwo centuries. Some of these articulations will be examined closely in the fol-lowing chapters. What may be usefully recognized provisionally at this point isthat, throughout the nineteenth century, endless speculation on the differ-ences and similarities between religions continually provided opportunities formodern Europeans to work out the problem of their own identity and to de-velop various conceptions of the relation between the legacy of Christianity onthe one hand and modernity and rationality on the other. As we shall see inmore detail presently, there was by no means a consensus as to what placeChristianity was to have in the future destiny of what was then beginning to becalled the European "race." Nor was there clear agreement over the question ofwhether Christianity, which had been an incontrovertibly dominant institutionin Europe since late Roman times, was indeed an essential and permanentcomponent of this destiny. Closely tied to these weighty concerns was the ques-tion of the historical (or possibly congenital) relation between Christianity andJudaism, and the question of whether Jews and Judaism had a role in the futureof Europe. In proximity to these concerns were issues arising from the lately

Introduction 19

prevalent notion that most of the prized institutions of the modern West(science, art, rationality, democracy, etc.) were of Greek origin; this renderedreligion (Christianity) a conspicuous anomaly amid the Hellenic pedigree ofthe European heritage. There were also questions stemming from the newlydiscovered affinity and apparent fraternity between "India" and Europe.

These matters are taken up for further deliberation in later chapters. Sufficeit to observe for the time being that the subject of religion and religions beganto seep into visibility under these interesting circumstances: ~I'l ~eligioncame to be identified as such-that is, more or less in the same sense that wethink of it today-it came to be recognized above all as something that, in theOpir"lionsof many self-consciously modern Europeans, was in the process ofdisappearing from their midst, or if not altogether disappearing, becomingcimimsc~il;ecl in such a way that it was finally discernible as a distinct, and~~, phenomenon.1s Meanwhile,~he two new sciences pertaining to non-European worlds, anthropology and Orientalism, promoted and bolstered thepresumption".~l1at~!stl1i~_~_c_~1.~:~ "religion" still held sway over all thosewho were unlike them; non- EuropeaIls! ,Europeans offhe premodern past, andamong their own contemporary neighbors, the uncivilized and uneducatedb~olic populace as well asihe superstitious urban poor, all of whom weresomething of "savages within." For, as those enlightened moderns of the nine-teenth"century-as represented by those who wrote and those who read theever-growing number of books on the subject of religion, magic, and super-stitions-observed with an admixture of horror and fascination, the oppres-sive supernaturalism of hidebound traditions and umbrageous priestcraft con-tinued to control and command those hapless others' thoughts and acts inmyriad idiosyncratic ways. 19

These general observations may in turn suggest some broad theses of the

18. This does not mean that all or even most of those nineteenth-century writers and par-ticipants in the emerging discourse on religion were expecting to relinquish Christianity al-together. Yetit is significant that, at least among the scholars of religion, the predominant ten-dency was a willingness to retain or to reappropriate, out of their own religious heritage,something other than Christianity as it had been passed down to them (or what they construedas such). To the extent that they believed Christianity offered something of essential truth andpermanent value, they would reclaim it anew on their own recognizance, largely free and inde-pendent of any ecclesiastical authority.

19· For a well-documented analysis of the European interests in the occult and the exotic ofthe period, see Randall Styers,-M~J<in,gMa,gic(2003). .~

--~-_._- ---.--- .-":---'~.--------'-'-'--

c

20 Introduction

following sort. T~~_modern discourse on religion and religions was from thev..!~!L~~J~inning-that is to say, inherently, if also ironically-a_discourse of..s.~~ul<lrization;at the same time, it was clearly a discourse of othering. My sus-picion, naturallyJsthar some deep symmetry and affinIty()bt~i~b~hveen thesetwo wings of the religion discourse; that they conjointly enable this discourseto do the vital work of churning the stuff of Europe's ever-expanding epistemicdomain, and of forging from that ferment an enormous apparition: the essen-tial identity of the West.

This book does not seek to prove the above-mentioned theses conclu-sively. Yet it is my sense that these statements adequately summarize the over-riding theme that the materials covered in the book, and the readings per-formed therein, continually and recurrently present.

I come now to the point of professing the nature of the present project morespecifically. The principal objective is a genealogy of a particular discursivepractice, namely, "world religions" as a category and as a conceptual frame-work initially developed in the European academy, which quickly became aneffective means of differentiating, variegating, consolidating, and totalizing alarge portion of the social, cultural, and political practices observable amongthe inhabitants of regions elsewhere in the world. This pluralist <iiscourse ismade all the more powerful, I believe, by a corollary presumption that anybroadly value-orienting, ethically inflected viewpoint must derive from a reli-giousheritag~. One of the most consequential effects of this discourse is that itspiritualizes what are material practices and turns them into expressions ofsomething timeless and suprahistorical, which is to say, it depoliticizes them.

To put this phenomenon in a somewhat broader context, various works cat-egorized under the rubric of colonial and postcolonial studies have made usaware of the sacralizing character of Orientalism.20 On this point NicholasDirks usefully explains:

When Said used the term Orientalism, he meant it in a number of inter-dependent senses. These senses included the general tendency of thought,found throughout colonial establishments, in which the Orient was made

20. Among relevant works of colonial and postcolonial studies I cite selectively the following:

Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (1993); Nicholas B. Dirks, The Hollow Crown (1987); VicenteRafael, Contracting Colonialism (1988); Gauri Viswanathan, Outside the Fold (1998).

Introduction 21

to be Europe's other, a land of exotic beings and exploitable riches thatcould service the economy and the imagination of the West. Orientalismalso refers to a much more sophisticated body of scholarship, embodiedin such practices as philology, archaeology, history, and anthropology, allglorifying the classical civilizations of the East (at the same time they glo-rify even more the scholarly endeavors of the West that made possibletheir recuperation) but suggesting that all history since the classical agewas characterized by decline, degeneration, and decadence. Qrientalism,whether in the guise of colonial cultures of belief or of more ~peCiallzedsubcultures of scholarship, shared fundam~ntal premises about the East,serving to denigrate the present, deny history, and repress any sensibilityregarding contemporary political, social, or cultural autonomy and po-tential in the colonized world.21

!n view of this insight, it has become exigent that the discourse on religion(s)be vie~~~~~.an_e~~~Iltia! component, that is, as a vital operating system withint~~.c()loni~l discourse of Orientalis!!l ...Moreover, as the statement by Dirkscogently reminds us, there is from the beginning a symbiotic, or perhaps bet-ter, congenital relation between Orientalism in the narrow sense (scholasticsubculture) and Orientalism in the more general sense (culture of colonial-ism). To reiterate a key point that has been proclaimed by numerous propo-nents of colonial and postcolonial criticism: the problem of Orienta list scienceis not a matter of would-be pure knowledge contaminated by ulterior politicalinterests, or science compromised by colonialism. Our task, then, is not tocleanse and purify the science we have inherited-such efforts, in any case, al-ways seem to end up whitewashing our own situation rather than rectifying thepast-but rather it is a matter of being historical differently.

3. A Synoptic Overview

T~~Rresent project is therefore an attempt to excavate, albeit in a piecemealf~hiori~sori1e 6fthe ninereenth'-century discursive practices that may be plau-sibly said to constitute the prehistory of the present-day world religions dis-co.~rse, and to recover the half-forgotten worries, hopes, and controversies thatanimated these practices, which became instrumental in generating the newclassificatory regime that is now ours.

21. Nic~oIas.B. Dirks, "Introduction: Colonialism and Culture," in Colonialism and Culture(1992),9. .

)

22 Introduction

The primary excavation site-which, in chronological terms, falls roughly inthep-urview of the "long" nineteenth century22-refers to the ever-expandingd~scursive domain within which the new sciences of comparative philologyandcorllparative religion emerged. It may be fairly supposed that the comparative~~ience of religion laid grounds for academic legitimatization of the pluralistdiscourse of world religions. In the first chapter, this domain will be circum-scribed by brief sketches of its outer limits. The first section of the chapteridentifies the moment when the new discourse of world religions suddenlyerupted full-fledged, namely, the early decades of the twentieth century. Thesecond section moves back in time to an earlier period and gives an accountof the long reign of a premodern to early-modern system of classifYing reli-gions-or more precisely, system of ordering nations-the system that beganto lose ground but survived into the first half of the nineteenth century. Thefinal section of the chapter considers several texts published in the first half ofthe nineteenth century that represent the transitional or metamorphic phase,as they testifY to the decline of the old taxonomic regime, and a slide into some-thing else that was tentative, uncertain, and as yet unnamed.

The second chapter further defines the contour of the nineteenth-centurycomparative science of religion by examining a discursive domain that is ad-jacent to, but customarily excluded from, that science. This adjacent realm isknown by the name "comparative theology"-in contradistinction to "com-parative religion," which is roughly synonymous with "history of religions,""science of religion," or Religionswissenschaft. Comparative theology, in con-trast, is generally understood to be a religiously motivated discourse. In its hey-day in the latter half of the nineteenth century, comparative theology was a verypopular, highly regarded, and respectable intellectual-spiritual pursuit. Theproponents of the science of religion in the twentieth century and thereafter,however, have been careful to keep their own practice at a distance from thisonce prolific enterprise, while reserving the privileged term "science" for stud-ies based on objective appraisal of empirical data, supposedly unmixed withpious sentiments or partisan denominational interests. To this day, the dis-ciplinary history of the science of religion has been intent on distinguishingcomparative religion from comparative theology. When we examine these twonineteenth-century schools, however, it would be difficult to deny that com-parative theology actually has much in common with today's discursive prac-

22. This, in accordance with historians' convention, refers to the years 1789-1914. Burin thecontext of the present study, the dates are approximate and somewhat coincidental.

Introduction 23

tice of world religions. In fact, it may be credibly suggested that the popular-ity of world religions was more a~egacy of the religious-evangelical enterpriseof comparative theology than of the arc~ne techni~al and sc~.olarly tradition ofthe nineteenth-century science of religioE' If this should be the case, the pres-ent-day suppression of-or, at least, ·what appears to be a willful ignoranceabout-comparative theology may be an intriguing historical conundrum inits own right.

The project of comparative theology has been deemed not scientific on thegrounds that it either presupposed or invariably drew the self-same conclusionas Christian theology, that Christianity was fundamentally different from allother religions, thus, in the last analysis, beyond compare. This singularity ofChristianity was often expressed in a vaguely oxymoronic phrase: "uniquelyuniversal." I,:t!Ie opinion of the theological comparativists, Christianity alone~~s truly trans historical and transnational in its import, hence universally validand -"i;lble at any place anytime, whereas all other religions were particular,bound and shaped by geographical, ethnic, and other local contingencies. Thecomparative theologians admitted that Christianity did have a temporal be-ginning just like any other religion, yet it alone was said not to have beendetermined or constrained by the accidents of its historical origin. The earli-est known manifestation of the term "world religion," albeit in Ger~~;,-;;-sin this sense of the "uniquely universal" religion of Christ-in other words,the religion of the world-as distinct from all other homegrown, indigenousreligions particular to the land: Landesreligionen, or "national religions," asthe latter term was commonly translated. This Christian-monopolistic use ofthe term "world religion" persisted concurrently with the developmen~ ofthescientific/!axoJ:}omic sense, as we see, for example, in the title Christianitythe World-Religion (1897), a book by John Henry Barrows, the president of theWorld's Parliament of Religions and the Haskell Lecturer on Comparative Re-ligion at the University of Chicago.

It might be surmised, therefore, that something like a watershed for themore objective-scientific, classificatory u~~of thete;.~-"worICCrelliirQl!s~~reached just when the term came to appear in the plural, that is, when morethan one religion was recognizedJ.sbeloflglngtotniScategory. This turningpoint, which occurred in the· i88os! is th~ subJ~ct 'o(chapter-3, which alsomarks the entry into part 2, the principal locus of the book. As we shall see, the.first non-Christian religion to be included in the category "world religion" h;donly recently been recognized as a distinct tradition and identified with a singlename=.Jjuddhism, a neologism. Chapter 4 examines the European discovery

24 Introduction

of Buddhism and how this suddenly visible "great religion" was conceptuallyconstructed as a world religion from the beginning. It is almost as though, hadit not be~I1 for Buddhism, science would not have had an immediate need forthe term "world religion." Meanwhile, there was a controversy among thosesame first-generation scientists of religion as to whether Islam should becounted as a world religion. Given that Islam had long been known to Euro-peans as a de facto trans regional religion and, moreover, as a formidable, im-perious domain of non-Christianity and a constant threat to it, the eruption ofthis controversy at this time is highly peculiar. It is significant, in Clnyevent, thatt;h~.first scholarly debate about worl(~eligjons had as much to do with theprobl;matic status ofIslam, as with the possible relation-morphological ori~neaTogfcaI=o(Bucl.dhism~arle~lY-dfscov~~ed religion of Aryan origin, toEuropean Christianity.- It is hardly a coincidence that Friedrich Max Muller, renowned Sanskritistand perhaps the most conspicuous philologist of the second half of the nine-teenth century, has been regarded as preeminent among the founders of thescience of religion. As it appeared, this new science owed its comparative logicto the science oflanguage, also known as comparative philology, which hadbeen flourishing ever since the European discovery of Sanskrit literature in thelatter half of the eighteenth century. The transference of the scientific methodfrom the field oflanguage to that of religion was carried out explicitly for thefirst time by Muller, on the occasion of his historic lecture series delivered in1870, appropriately entitled "Introduction to the Science of Religion." T~ !heextent that this founding narrative is true, certain incipient components of theworld religi()l1~~i~cOllrSel11ay be traced in the history of comparative philol-og~\vith-this in mind, chapter 5 sketches the nineteenth-century developmentof philological scholarship, which yields the following observation:

Whatever fascination and promise the science oflanguage might have heldfor the pioneering scholars of Oriental languages, one driving passion of com-parative philology was in the exaltation of a particular grammatical apparatus:inflection. Metaphysically and abstractly imagined rather than historically doc-umented, inflection was construed as a syntactical structure resulting naturallyand directly from the innermost spiritual urge of a people (Volk), and as such itwas said to attest to the creativity and the spirit of freedom intrinsic to the dis-position of those who originated this linguistic form. Not surprisingly, theseattributes, together with the grammatical form itself, were touted as the de-fining characteristics of the family ofIndo-European (Aryan) languages, thefamily comprising Sanskrit as its "eldest daughter" in the East, Persian as her

Introduction 25

close kin, but also with the Western siblings Greek, Latin, Teutonic, Slavonic,and so forth, of which most modern European languages were unmistakabledescendants. The ancient, broad band of the Indo-European languClge family,stretched across from east to west, had been intersected, in both space andtime, by another linguistic family. This other group, the Semitic languages, in-cluded Arabic and Hebrew, which were well known to Europeans because theywere the language of the Qur'an and of the Old Testament respectively. Thegreat majority of nineteenth-century philologists maintained that, in compar-ison to the first family, this second tribe oflanguages was decidedly imperfectand inchoate in inflectional capability, and with this imperfection came all thelimitations that characterized their native speakers as a race. Muller's contem-porary and longtime correspondent, Ernest Renan, is among the most cele-brated exponents of this view.

Much of world history-as nineteenth-century scholars understood thematter-had been the work of interaction between these two "families" or"races," Aryan and Semitic. Extending beyond this huge crossroads of worldhistorical powers lay an almost indefinite domain of a third estate, consistingofinnumerable languages whose genealogical relation was less certain, exceptfor some obvious local clustering here and there. Comparative philology sug-gested that these languages had syntactical structures even further removedfrom inflection than the Semitic tongues; in fact, their mode of significationwas believed to have developed in reverse order to that ofthe Aryan languages.The syntax of these languages, it was speculated, had begun as the concatena-tion of root words and was formed through gradual coalescing of the roots andthe attendant atrophy of what had been distinct, originally independent wordroots. This process of agglutination was exactly the opposite of the develop-ment of "pure" inflection, in which each word ending grew naturally and spon-taneously out of the word root, as it were, from within. According to this theorywidely embraced by philologists of the nineteenth century, the inflectionalstructure of Semitic languages was fated to remain imperfect and constrained,and therefore impure, because the process of development was already com-promised by incipient agglutination.

It is in light of this devaluation of the Semitic in relation to the Aryan (orIndo-European) that we may begin to understand the new logic and the re-newed momentum behind the particularly harsh condemnation oqsla~(chapter 6j:-With the emergence of the science of comparative philology, it isas thou~~ the age-ol~_E~~!,.~~n_~r:ti-~ellliti~~-or more precisely, negativesentiments against the Jews-took~l!~vvturn and found a novel deployment.

26 Introduction

In short, this scientificallyb_<lsecLanti-Semitism fa<jlitated a n~w:~xl'r:f~S_LQUDfEurope's ag-e--oT(ra.ni;~-sitr~o"Yard~~}~l~f!1ic p_owers, in:~<:>-faras this science~e~Eizesl}ews and Arabs as being "of the same stock," conjointly epitomiz-ing the character of the Semitic "race."

It is difficult to ascertain the full implications of this powerful notion, and toappreciate its utility for reconceptualizing the self-understanding of ChristianEurope. Chief among the new challenges posed by this idea was its deploy-ment in the semitization ofIslam. T.Q~~nceforward,the zealously monotheistic,~.._---- -- . ~._"

materially poor, mentally rigid, and socially illiberal desert Arab-alreadyfrequently described by nineteenth-century writers as "fanatic"-has cometo stand as the quintessential Muslim, thus displacing the earlier image of the"Mohammedan" as an indolent Turk wallowing in opulent infidelity. At the~~rge time, in obvious correlation to the vilifYing and condescending irJ1ag~QfSemitic Islam, there surged among European scholars a renewed interest in so-called Islamic mysticism. Sufism was particularly valorized as a higher form ofIslam, Persian (or possibly Indian or neo-Platonic) in origin, therefore_essen-tially Aryan in nature, hence exterior to what was deemed Islam proper.

Chapter 7 considers the position ofF.l\1<l~Mullerwith respect to these philo-logical innovations and the subsequent development of the science of religionand of the world religions discourse. As a reputed patriarch of modern com-parative study of religion and advocate of the genealogical classification of re-ligion modeled after the science oflanguage, it might be expected that his rolewas above all to authorize the tripartite division of the human race and to ad-vance the comprehensive mapping of the world religions. While these out-~o~es indeed appear to have followed in the wake of his scholarly endeavorsand they are often personally attributed to him by posterity, a_closer examina-tion of Muller's work suggests that much of this result was, in an importantsense, despite his own theoretical standpoint and against his wishes and opin-ions. As is evident especially from his early work-most significantly, "Last Re-sults of the Turanian Researches," also known as "On the Turanian Langua~e"(1853) and The Languages of the Seat ofWar in the East(18S4; 2d ed.~ 1855), twolengthy essays written with great energy and in haste, but little read eversince-his outlook on the origin and development oflanguage and oflanguagegroups diverged markedly from those of comparative philologists up to_histime, as well as of scholars who came thereafter. Not surprisingly, his idea ofscientific classification of religions, too, was considerably at odds with the var-ious taxonomies advanced by his peers, the latter being beholden to the logic ofphilological classification. The divergence of Muller's views from the main-

Introduction 27

stream was generally understood by his contemporaries as attributable tohis religious (rather than scholarly) orientation. It was thought that his old-fashioned attachment to the biblical doctrine of the unitary origin of human-kind, or monogenesis, did not allow him to entertain fairly the possibility ofmultiple and separate origins of races; hence much of what was distinctive inhis own theorizing was roundly dismissed as mere idiosyncrasy, somethingstemming from his prescientific sentiments, and thus oflittle scholarly im-port. ~~ller in turn protested against this dismissal precisely on philologicalscientific grounds, but apparently to no avail.

The analysis in chapter 7 thus provides occasion to reflect critically notonly on the position ofM uller in the legacy of the science of religion, of whichhe is reputedly a key founding figure, but also on the relation-and distance-between the logic of scientific comparativism and the doctrine of religiouspluralism.

What transpired between the closing decades of the nineteenth century andthe 1920s-that is, the efficient causes, so to speak, that finally brought aboutthe new discourse of world religions-will not be comprehensively studied inthis book. It does not seem likely, in fact, that this transition could be ade-quately described or credibly explained by examining academic trends and reli-gious movements alone. Instead of attempting such a speculative global expla-nation, then, the last portion of the book, part 3, offers a series of open-ended,that is to say, inconclusive and rather more projective, observations. In effect,the individual sections comprising chapter 8 identify various events and do-mains that might warrant further investigation in the future: (I) the historicalsignificance and influence of preeminent publication projects, most impor-tantly, the SacredBooksof the East; (2) the preconditions and the aftermath ofthe World's Parliament of Religions, held in Chicago in 1893; (3) the role playedby various private individuals and foundations in promoting the new scholar-ship on religion, or what was more likely called "natural theology" in the nine-teenth century and "history of religion(s)" in the twentieth. Section 4 acknowl-edges what this book, out of practical necessity, leaves out: the participation ofthe non-West in the production of the world religions categories. The final sec-tion (5) considers another possible strategy for tracing the transformation ofthe world religions discourse from the older, more restrictive notion (as uni-ver~alistic religions)_to the later, more inclusive one(as all of the major reli-g~~s~~ the world). This metamorphic process-may be illuminecfby; broadsurvey and comprehensive analysis of world religions texts published in theearly decades of the twentieth century-a task beyond the scope of this book.

28 Introduction

Here, an example or two must suffice. An expressly pedagogic volume calledReligions of the World, edited by Carl Clemen, for example, clearly distinguishesbetween the categories of "world religions" and "national religions"; yet, in ad-dition to Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam, the category of world religionsnow includes a religion hitherto considered a quintessential national religion,namely, Judaism-though with another name, "religion of the Hebrews." Al-though Clemen's is but one example and not necessarily typical, the inclu-sion of Judaism in the league of world religions at this point may provesignificant also in that it roughly coincided with the inception of a new con-cept of the West defined as Judea-Christian. This hyphenated identity of theWest-which gained momentum almost exclusively in the United States in the1930s-appears to have eclipsed the significance of the older idea of Europedefined as Christendom.

Chapter 8 concludes with a brief reflection on the significance of Max Weberin this moment of transition. In his massive unfinished work EconomicEthicofthe World Religions (Wirtschaftsethik der Weltre!igionen)-of which the dispropor-tionately famous Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism was a harbinger-Weber effectively undermined the erstwhile distinction between world religionsand national religions, much debated by the nineteenth-century scientists ofreligion. Weber accomplished this not by means of any theoretical delibera-tions but seemingly by default: he had no use for the term "national religions."More specifically, Weber was interested in the subject of so-called world reli-gions-which now included not only Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam butalso Hinduism, Confucianism, and with some qualifications, ancient Juda-ism-because, in his opinion, each of these religions without exception wasdetermined by particular characteristics of the society in which it had been along-standing tradition. From his adamantly secularist sociological stand-point, it was axiomatic that all religions were particular, no matter how univer-salistic their cosmologies and their evangelical aspirations. For Weber, ineffect, all of what he called "world religions" were what the nineteenth-centuryscholars called "national religions."

It still remains to be inquired in earnest, however, whether the transforma-tion of the concept of world religions from the highly selective, discriminatorysense of the nineteenth century to the seemingly more inclusive sense of thetwentieth can be considered a triumph of the pluralist ethos, whether the ex-pansion of the list is something to be celebrated as democratization of the sci-ence of religion and decentralization ofEurohegemonic perspective more gen-erally, or for that matter, whether the intent and import of Weber's unfinished

Introduction 29

project had anything whatsoever to do with such a "pluralist" agenda. The dis-course of world religions, in any event, finally came of age when the potentand dangerous challenges and opportunities for world-hegemonic power andglory presented themselves, for the first time, to the naked eye of the European.Chapter 9 casts a glance in the direction of this question by considering one ofthe leading theologians of the time, Ernst Troeltsch. We will attend to the con-ceptual and rhetorical maneuvers observable in the last lecture he wrote, butnever delivered, owing to his untimely death in 1923. The lecture, tellingly en-titled "The Place of Christianity among the World Religions," was a plea for aunited front of the coalition of all religions-'::or what he termed "religion assuch"-against the surging tide of secularism. At the same time, his clarioncall amounted to a fresh declaration of the universal relevance of Christian-ity, which Troeltsch called unambiguously and without irony the religion ofEurope. This last chapter, then, entertains the possibility that the discourseof world religions, whose rhizomatic growth in the nineteenth century I trace,when it finally erupted in the early twentieth century, facilitated the conversionof the Eurohegemonic claim from one context to another-that is, from theolder discourse of Christian supremacy (now considered bankrupt by manyliberal Christians) to the new discourse of world religions, couched in the lan-guage of pluralism and diversity.

4· Writing History in the Age of Theory: ABrief Discourse on Method

Everything Kraus wrote is likethat: a silence turned inside out, a silence that catchesthe storm of events in its blackfolds, billows, its livid lining turned outward.WALTER BENJAMIN, "Karl Kraus"

It may be said that the academy as an institution in modern times has been a rel-atively sequestered place, self-consciously detached from the surroundingworld, thus somewhat more amenable to the centripetal forces of close anal-ysis. The alleged isolationism of the academy, of course, is not to be taken atface value. Yet, habitual proclamations of autonomy and relentless pursuits ofself-fashioning are characteristic of this institution, and these habits oftencause academicians to leave a considerable trail of paper in their wake.

Despite the abundance of self-commentary, it nonetheless remains very dif-ficult to ascertain why or how some changes in ideas or changes in scholarlyconventions occur. To be sure, such events as scholarly debates and contro-versies can be fertile ground for historical excavation. But it is essential thatwe begin by recognizing, with utmost seriousness, that these events are, first

30 Introduction

and foremost, rhetorical events. Be they disputes, supplications, intellectualcourtships, or apologia, these dealings are carried out over language and bymeans oflanguage, in a fairly ordinary sense of that term. To overlook this ut-terly obvious fact, and to trivialize such a discursive event by declaring that it ismerely about language, is at once to short-circuit any possible path for a cri-tique of ideology and to be duped by the crypto-idealist ruse of the academy'sown self-fashioning. What matters is the practice oflanguage that is never, inthe long run, merely about language.

To put this more graphically, when a headstrong intellectual actively at-tempts to inflect someone else's prose or to outwit the rhetorical force of a pre-decessor's (or an adversary's) statement by giving it further momentum or anovel spin, the attempt often ends up dragging out, pulling up, and thereby re-vealing certain forces and discursive tectonics that are not reducible to any-thing so local and insular-sounding as the "personal motives" of the interlocu-tors concerned. Such general geotectonic factors are, in a word, historical.They remain viable for the most part invisibly, but on occasion they flare up.Particularly in moments of conceptual difficulty or ideational "fix," these fac-tors often burst into visibility, and this happens not only in dialogues and de-bates among several interlocutors, but also in the contemplative monologue ofa single individual, where the solitary author may be trying to write herself outof a certain prescripted problem, trying to outmaneuver the logical constraintsand rhetorical compulsion of that script, in order to reshuffle the hand she hasbeen dealt by the historical moment. It is these gestures and maneuvers-conformist, reactionary, or revolutionary-that we shall attend to and seek tounderstand.

But what does a turn of phrase reveal? How could something so minute andseemingly so incidental as a gesture oflanguage indicate anything beyond whathas its provenance in the author's person and his immediate circumstance, thatis, anything over and above his conscious intentions, unconscious motives,habits, dispositions, social milieu, and the like? Above all, could forms oflan-guage employed by this or that author, rhetorical moves made at this or thatmoment, disclose to us anything of significance about history, and if so, how?Or, perhaps more to the point, could an analysis of such forms and moves beenlisted and incorporated for the purpose of producing historical knowledge,or even historical narrative?

These questions are difficult to answer. Even though I know the answers tobe generally in the affirmative, the reasoning that could be articulated to sup-

Introduction 31

port them might seem too intricate to be fully credible; it could appear eithersuspiciously obscure or improbably clever, and in the end, devious and in-scrutable. This impression may be unavoidable, particularly in the eyes of somehistorians schooled in another method, who may see their own professionalpractice precisely as a powerful antidote against pseudohistorical pronounce-ments, including those proffered by the overly literary, language-obsessed,rhetorical analysts who are predisposed to the kind of intellectual activities de-scribed as "close reading," the kind of neoformalist interpretation carried out,so it is charged, hermetically sealed off from everything outside "the text." Alltoo often, itis said, such an empiricallyundisdplined approach ends up takingthe anecdotal for the historical.

I acknowledge the legitimacy of these concerns, though not of a blanket dis-missal of the rhetorical analytic strategy itself. At the same time, I am movedto point out-though I am certainly not the first to do so-that what oftenunderlies the historical-realist suspicion is a particular assumption about thenature oflanguage, or what is often referred to as the representational theory oflanguage, an assumption not generally shared by the contemporary partisansof rhetorical analysis. According to the least subtle version of this theory, lan-guage at its best reflects what it is not, that is, reality; language mirrors reality,ideally, with minimum refraction. This theory presupposes a particular ontol-ogy and thereby precludes other ways of construing and configuring the rela-tion between language and reality, or between language and history. It wouldnot hear of what Walter Benjamin describes in the passage quoted above, a neg-ative revelation oflanguage, the possibility of the seamy underside of a quies-cent language billowing outin the ferocious passing of a "storm of events" thatare too real, too wild, too volatile for representation.

Given divergences in professional orientation, it seems doubtful that thereshould be definitive answers that would satisfY all readers once and for all. Forone thing, it must be conceded that the degree of clarity and transparency at-tainable while various parties are separately encamped is not great. It seemsunlikely, moreover, that an abstract methodological exposition alone wouldcause people to reconsider their own position or to switch camps merely out of,say, curiosity or sympathy. Under the circumstances, then, since what can bepersuasively said theoretically about the method is limited, I will instead brieflydescribe, in a prosaic and practical manner, the procedures that I have actuallyfollowed in producing this work.

'"'"

32 Introduction

Above all, I have sought to compose a work of critical history fundamentallydriven and animated by the logic and the rhetorical forces of the primarysources. The general argument of the book is constructed as a series of read-ings performed upon the body of some prominent, exemplary, exceptional, orotherwise significant texts, in particular, those written in the vernacular for layaudiences, published between the early seventeenth and the early twentiethcentury, whose subject matter can be broadly described as "religions of theworld." Although the texts and passages privileged for close scrutiny are neces-sarily selective, I have intended that this reading project as a whole be sup-ported by a comprehensive survey of the genre, amounting to roughly two- tothree-hundred titles in all, depending on how narrowly or broadly one definesthe genre. In practical terms, my strategic aspirations entailed, on the onehand, speed-reading a large quantity of fairly old, voluminous texts (oftenunder conditions oflimited access because of their rarity and antiquity) and onthe other hand, detailed, slow reading of selected texts with heightened rhetor-ical sensitivity. Expending more time and effort on the primary sources in thisfashion, rather than following the lead of existing scholarship that might bepartially or tangentially related to my own concern, was a choice I made early inthe project. 23

Needless to say, speed-reading and rhetorical analysis both require a rela-tively high degree oflinguistic competence, the ability I may claim to possessadequately in English, my second language, but decidedly less in German,French, or Italian, and none or close to none in some other European languagesthat would or might have been of relevance (Dutch, to be sure, and possiblySpanish, Danish, and Swedish, for example). This, admittedly, contributed tothe focus on the texts written in or translated into English analyzed here; butthere is also another, more structural reason for the predominance of the An-glophone literature. For, as already adumbrated in the previous section and aswill be demonstrated extensively in what follows, the actual manifestation ofthe world religions discourse in the form familiar to us today was very muchan American phenomenon; twentieth-century America was a final destination

23. This may explain, if not excuse, the relative paucity of reference to secondary literature.

This is not to say that I have not learned much from the existing scholarship on related areas andtopics. These topics include the history of the study of religion as a modern scientific discipline

and, to some extent, recent debates on the so-called Western construction of religion as a con-cept or as a category. Some of the relevant literature has been mentioned in note 9 above. But Idid not choose to commence the argument by entering into direct conversation with any of the

existing critical literature.

Introduction 33

of the migration of a European concept (We!tre!igion or Were!dgodsdienst).24This concept was first transposed upon the nineteenth-century (mostly British)schemata for classifying and mapping "other religions," and eventually it be-came instrumental in the ascendancy of the discourse of religious pluralismand diversity, the discourse that has since been viewed as a signature attributeof a specifically American ethos. In this course of transmigration and muta-tion, moreover, certain ideological underpinnings of the older hierarchicaldiscourse did not so much diminish and disappear as become unrecognizableunder the new outlook of the pluralist ideology-or supposed democracy-ofworld religions.

Such, then, are the procedures, constraints, parameters, and the emergent sce-nario of the present work. This brief statement may notamount to a theoreticaljustification of a methodology, but for reasons I have rehearsed above, it seemsinjudicious for an author to attempt to convert the readers before the first chap-ter begins. Instead, I merely wish to earn from my readers as much benefit ofthe doubt as is reasonable. Hence my best hope for this introduction, as I seeit, is to impart a certain illumination in advance, and-to shift the metaphorslightly-to help conjure an atmosphere for felicitous reading.

24· I should add, however, that in recent years, there is evidence that this notion of world re-ligion has been successfully exported to various other linguistic and cultural domains.